Excerpt from Planet Funny by Ken Jennings, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The playful postmodern impulse eventually bled into all the other visual arts—even architecture, where it had been axiomatic since the days of the Bauhaus that function and efficiency were all that mattered. "A house," Le Corbusier had said, in one of the century's most depressing pronouncements, "is a machine for living in." There was only one possible future, and it was going to be defined by the clean, uniform glass-and-steel boxes of the International Style, dammit. It wasn't until the 1970s that architects woke from their reveries of rectilinear purity, squinted at their blueprints, and started to wonder where the jokes were. And so the pendulum swung back toward the winking neon of Charles Moore and the cheekily ornamented faux casinos of Michael Graves and the rippling titanium currents of Frank Gehry. As fans of John le Carré and James Bond spy fare know, even the British secret service, that least funny of all institutions, now operates out of a bizarrely kitschy postmodern Aztec temple on the Thames that employees call "Legoland." These new buildings aren't exactly hilarious, of course; it seems almost beside the point that no one in history has ever lol'ed at the sight of one of them. But it was enough that the architect seemed to have acknowledged that fun exists. As Spy magazine memorably asked, in a 1988 cover package on postmodernism, "For a building, is it funny?"

Muhammad Ali and Other Superheroes
Let's fast-forward from Marcel Duchamp's Paris to June 22, 1961. That's the day a young Cassius Clay did a morning radio interview in Las Vegas alongside the legendary wrestler "Gorgeous George" Wagner. In response to the host's questions about his upcoming bout against Duke Sabedong, just the seventh of his fledgling pro career, Clay was confident but restrained, in keeping with his public persona at the time. Then he watched George answer a similar question about his next match, against "Classy" Freddie Blassie. "I'll kill him! I'll tear off his arm!" the wrestler fumed. "If this bum beats me, I'll crawl across the ring and cut off my hair, but it's not gonna happen, because I'm the greatest wrestler in the world!" Clay was astounded at George's sheer force of personality and started to see how he could reinvent his persona as a boxer. "Keep on bragging, keep on sassing, and always be outrageous," Gorgeous George told him later when they met backstage after his wrestling match.

Sports heroes in those days were, almost to a man, not funny. They were sleepy-eyed white dullards with pomaded hair and beer bellies. When athletes got laughs back then, when Jim Thorpe told Gustav V of Sweden, "Thanks, King!" after receiving his Olympic medals or Yogi Berra issued one of his trademark cockeyed aphorisms, like "You can observe a lot just by watching," those quips were invariably unintentional or apocryphal. Or both, if that's even possible. It was all so dire that the funniest athlete of the 1930s—you can look this up—was actually Seabiscuit. Compare that to today's mischievous, smart-aleck sports heroes. The hinge on which that change turned was Gorgeous George strutting down the aisle in a satin robe, accompanied by a rose-water-spritzing valet, and his newest fan Cassius Clay sitting up tall in his seat and seeing an alternate future in his head: the self-aware boasting, the flirting with reporters, the well-rehearsed comic verse, all of it.

Every sport didn't become funny overnight, of course. Even in my day as a young sports fan, everyone knew who the lone joker on the team roster was, the John Kruk or the Deion Sanders or the John Salley, the guy you knew you'd see in a booth someday. It wasn't like the modern locker room, where everyone is clowning and cheerfully trash-talking and angling for that postretirement analyst job. But every wisecracking modern athlete today of every race has the same model: Muhammad Ali. In 1964, it didn't immediately endear the cocksure young man to everyone in America, mostly because he was black and Muslim. But in hindsight, you could make a case that Ali was the most influential comedian of the twentieth century, and comedy wasn't even his day job.

Excerpted from Planet Funny by Ken Jennings. Copyright © 2018 by Ken Jennings. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.